


the adriatic

by audries



Category: Cheers (TV)
Genre: F/M, a tag i never thought a sitcom fic would warrant but shit starts to get boring four years in, post-Near Death Plane Experience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25955956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audries/pseuds/audries
Summary: “I’m not saying anything,” Diane says. “I’m saying nothing whatsoever.”
Relationships: Diane Chambers/Sam Malone
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	the adriatic

**Author's Note:**

> someone asked for a sam & diane fight and as we all know, because everyone on here is a close personal friend of mine, i fucking love a sam & diane fight

“Gee, Diane,” Sam starts brightly, the same way he’d said it that one excruciating December when they couldn’t seem to slowly kill each other fast enough. The follow-up then: You sure are _mean_ , you know that? 

Now: “You really know how to pick ‘em!” 

He stuffs his hands in his pockets, twisting his heels into the grey slab of sidewalk Jack had sped off and left them on a moment earlier. Red tail-light glow and the smell of cordite hanging blankly in the air where his car had been like Bugs Bunny off a cliff. How far that hare had had to fall. She can imagine saying as much to Sam, who had also recently hung suspended in the air, facing one hell of a drop, and who still watched Saturday morning cartoons, or had when he’d spent them in her kitchen. _They show this to children?_

It's dark now, the airport in the distance and the glare of the phonebooth across the street notwithstanding, and even still she can see Sam’s glower, the purpling edge of his bruised eye. With his hands like that she always thinks he looks like a child. _Sure they do—it’s a joke, honey, see? No rabbits were harmed in, uh, the drawing of this drawing. They have to put that in there for legal reasons._

She crosses her arms, twisting at the waist to peer down at where the cab should be coming. “Believe me, he’s not my favorite of the lot, Jack.” 

“The lot,” Sam says blankly, then laughs, “she says the lot! That’s great. That’s really great, Diane. When do I get to meet the next guy? And how’s he gonna try to kill me, huh? Man, the possibilities are endless. I always thought being mauled by a tiger would be kinda cool. Any of the soccer players or counts or, I don’t know, murderers you let spin ya around for a bit in Europe fit that bill? Anyone with a big cat thing?“ 

Diane whips back around. “Spin me—!“ 

“No, no,” Sam takes his hands out of his pockets to press them down at her. “It makes sense, I mean, you’re pretty smart, like to think you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, why _wouldn’t_ you disappear in Europe for six weeks after dancing yourself right off some table and into the arms of the guy who looked the most certifiable?” Diane sputters, blinking furiously at him, but Sam is pacing a little now, his voice hitting a miserable octave: “And at a _bar_! Diane! A _bar_! You didn’t stop to think why it might not be a great idea to let some stranger from _a bar_ take you out?” He stops up short and looks at her sincerely, insistent. 

She mutters, “Evidently not,” but he’s back to pacing.

“Why _wouldn’t_ that be a great idea? Oh! I know! Because you could have been chopped up into little pieces and thrown into the Atlantic,” he points at himself suddenly, affronted, “and _I_ would have been wandering around Europe looking like a jerk—which I already did, so now I’m a double jerk, thank you, a double jerk wandering around Italy trying to find some crazy blonde lady that everybody knew had gone and gotten herself murdered!” 

Sam launches into a version of this stilted conversation. He is beatific, the doltish American. He’s looking for a girl about yay high. Blonde hair, blue eyes, real pretty? The wiser European is low-voiced. Does he mean the grown woman who had recently gotten into a van with someone who offered her candy? Yep, that’d be the one. 

Diane laughs—the Atlantic, the bleak horror of the world as Sam always seemed to imagine it converging around her, _they show this to children?_ —but it’s high, shrilly. Not even her usual fighting-with-Sam-laugh which was at some times a sarcastic punched up thing, and at others, her most genuine. This stinging variation has been her laugh since they landed instead of _impacted_ earlier this evening. It had been her laugh in Europe. It was not-not the laugh of someone Jack Dalton might catch around the waist in a bar in Milan, though she had not been falling off of anything, and offer to sail to Montenegro. Of someone who might blink at him three times until he stopped multiplying and say, flattered: _Why, yes._

“I can’t believe this,” she hisses, which she has to do after the laugh because it always feels a little like a chest compression. “I cannot _believe_ I am being lectured on my sexual history by Sam Malone, whose sexual history could be split into epochs and taught to anthropology students interested in primitive cultures.” 

“You think you could teach it?” Sam smirks—he _would_ think that was a compliment. 

Mixed metaphors, and majors, aside, no, she couldn’t teach it. She’d audit, because she doesn’t even need the credits. She’d sit at the front, and she’d say it was because she always forgot her glasses, but really she only needs them for reading, and only then in dim light. She was principled, and practiced at this, hand neatly raised. _Professor Malone, I have a question?_

Sam is looking hard at her. The smirk flinches and drops. Sometimes he understands and lets her think he doesn’t, which is worse than not understanding at all. He says, “You couldn’t even pass the course.” 

_Actually, it’s more of a comment._

“You know something, Sam?” She steps close. “You’ve got a lot of nerve berating me for my choices, pretending like it mattered to you where I was, what I was doing, which murderers I did or did not choose to spend my time with, when the only reason I was in Europe in the first place is—“ she had said something like this to Jack, and the vague shadow memory of it in her mouth tastes like tequila and rock salt and it makes her hiccup a little “—is because, because you couldn’t grow up long enough to ask me to stay!” 

“I asked!” Sam yelps, indignant. “I asked! You didn’t answer! You said no!” 

“Frasier asked me to _marry_ him, Sam. He asked me a real, adult question. In Italy! At a restaurant where the menus weren’t double-sided, or laminated. You, I don’t know. You offered to leave the back door unlocked so I could sneak over when your parents weren’t around. It’s not the same.” She crosses her arms, sniffs, shrugging and turning her head towards the road again, to the cab’s slow not-coming. “It’s not enough.” 

She wishes that, at this, Sam might put his hands back in his pockets and shrug, bump her shoulder, and admit it never is, and mean it never will be. Wishes he might let this all lie horribly mangled but mercifully quiet at their feet, whatever it was they kept waking up and shaking between them until it cried. But she knows if he did she would be suddenly sure they’d died in that plane and landed in some eerie limbo. In which they had to be good, and silent, and let it go, because their bones were busy burning up in a field outside of Boston. 

Sam says, “Oh, so it’s my fault now?” She thinks he says this because they are alive. 

“You ditch Frasier, you don’t tell me where you are, you try to get killed, you try to get _me_ killed, and you’re saying it’s my fault now?”

Across the street, in the white pool of light under the phonebooth, there are a couple of pigeons nervously hobbling around. They look over sharply, pink-eyed, at Sam’s raised voice.

“I’m not saying anything,” Diane says. “I’m saying nothing whatsoever.” 

The pigeons scuffle and coo. Birds are extremely stupid, Diane thinks. She doesn’t know this in any sort of academic sense, she just doesn’t understand why any living thing would choose ever not to be on the ground. 

“If I was saying something,” she continues, “which I am not, but if I was, I would simply be saying that it is absolutely rich for you to stand out here and pass judgment when I only stayed in Europe because you didn’t come to take me home.” 

“Yeah!” Sam booms, and the pigeons scatter. “Except that I did!” 

Oh, right. 

In Europe, she had admittedly been feeling a bit Tolstoyian about the whole affair. Their little three-man show, she and Sam and Frasier, shaking out even or stacked against her, depending on how you looked at it, or which professor led the seminar. In Europe, she had been the abandoned abandoner, blowing up something real for just the slightest glance of fantasy—not even a promise, just an idea, and getting it fed right back to her. Stuffed full of her inane impressions, floating into the bar in Milan, and later with Jack towards Montenegro, she had been buoyant with martyrdom, resplendent in her poor judgment, light as air with the loss of her misplaced faith. 

Of course, the professor at the head of the table chides, Anna Karenina was paranoid, misled, addled. Perhaps entirely wrong.

“Oh,” Diane says dumbly, “right,” and the cab comes suddenly quick around the corner. Might have hit her if she’d stepped off the sidewalk at the wrong time, dazed, all where am I? What am I doing? Why? 

The cab’s left front wheel is a little deflated, it thumps-thump-thumps against the asphalt as it rolls to a stop in front of her. Boston, she thinks, looking at it as Sam steps around her, holds the door open so she can slide in. Getting in a cab, because we didn’t die. 

“Diane.” With his hand on the open door, Sam peers down. “You gonna be alright?” 

“Yes,” she says. “It’s the Adriatic, also.” 

“What?” 

“Italy is on the Adriatic. I would have been chopped up and thrown into the Adriatic.” 

“Oh.” Sam drums his fingers on the cab door. “Right.” 

“The Atlantic is what you flew over,” she says, “to come get me.” 

Sam frowns. Swallows. “Right.” 

“Hey,” the cab driver leaning over from the front seat. “Where we going?” 

“Uh,” Sam glances down at her. “You want me to...to take you home?” 

“I want a drink,” Diane says quickly, for fear of what else such a sentence structure might inadvertently elicit. But as soon as she says it, she really does. “Or five.” 

Sam says, “Good thing I know a place,” and the cab’s wheel says thump-thump-thump as they churn back into Boston, and it keeps them firmly on the ground.


End file.
